Video game called ‘Tacoma’ invites players to explore a mystery inspired by the City of Destiny

What happened to the crew of Lunar Transfer Station Tacoma?

In spring 2017, a pair of Portland-based video-game designers will invite you to find out.

Their names: Steve Gaynor, 34, and Karla Zimonja, 39. Their company: Fullbright, an inside joke that refers to computer-game code, where “Fullbright” means dialing the brightness to 11.

Their game: “Tacoma,” a science-fiction mystery set in the not-too-distant future of 2088 on an obscure space station that wouldn’t be anyone’s first choice for space tourism.

The game draws its title from the City of Destiny, as well as its inspiration.

“There’s actually a back story,” Gaynor said, smiling.

Apart from the name, the local connection is less than obvious. Opening footage from the yet-to-be-released game reveals the entrance to a spaceship, and blobby 3-D avatars that look like gummy mannequins, the cyber-ghosts of the absent crew.

Deeper in the ship’s corridors, small signs of humanity appear — hand-written sticky notes mark a trail to the station’s observation deck:

This way to the TACOMA DOME

Like nothing on earth

THE DOME!

“It’s traditional for astronauts to have a sense of humor,” Zimonja said.

For those who know little about video games, it’s tough to explain what “Tacoma” is, and easier to explain what it’s not.

It’s not a frenetic first-person shoot-em-up where monsters and enemy soldiers pop out of shadows and windows to kill you. You can’t die, even if you try.

It’s not a racing game with souped-up cars, a football simulation with this season’s stars or a medieval quest populated with clans, dragons and sorcerers. The player doesn’t leap spike-filled chasms or match colored crystals or build virtual cities.

Instead, “Tacoma” falls into a small but increasingly popular genre that Zimonja and Gaynor call “story exploration.” The objective: uncover the secrets of someone else’s yesterdays.

The game takes place on a space station between Earth and the moon. Its main character is a corporate contractor assigned to recover archived data after the unexplained evacuation of the station’s six-member crew. The ship’s artificial intelligence system preserves the memories and actions of the missing crew in a series of virtual recordings.

One pair of characters holds a private conversation in one room, while another character moves away for a private moment that reveals something personal.

The player can follow each sequence, rewind the moments and review them from different angles. Thus, the story unfolds, like a documentary novel with scrambled chapters — but the sequence and depth of discovery belong to the player.

“It’s about being in this place and using the interactivity of the game to find out all the details that you can about what is the identity of this place, and who were the people that lived here, and what was the story that happened here,” Gaynor said.

Zimonja puts it another way. The skills required to play “Tacoma” don’t involve mashing buttons and quick reactions. The needed abilities resemble those from other professions, including journalism.

“It’s skills you already have in everyday life, when you’re curious about something and want to find out about it — investigating and seeking, skills that anyone has,” she said. “Everybody’s curious. People love to find out about other people.”

Its release is still months away, but “Tacoma” is generating precious buzz from the gaming industry. Gaynor and Zimonja presented footage from the game’s first 15 minutes in June at E3 2016, the industry’s annual trade show in Los Angeles.

So far, critical reactions have been favorable. The gaming website IGN called the opening scenes “smart, beautiful and spooky,” and set up an online hub to track the game’s progress.

Originally, Gaynor intended to set “Tacoma” in the real Tacoma, or the city as it was in the early 2000s. The main character was a folk singer raised in a working-class family, who achieved minor fame and retreated from it.

More research would have followed, had Gaynor stuck with the idea. He’s visited Tacoma, but only briefly. In his half-formed early conception, the city, seen as a working-class dock town that changed over time, was a metaphor for the main character’s internal struggles.

“There was going to be a lot of ’60s time period stuff,” Zimonja said.

Yet something nagged at Gaynor. The idea felt a bit easy, too close in spirit to Fullbright’s previous game, “Gone Home,” released in 2013 to wide acclaim. It was set in 1990s Portland, and featured a young woman returning to her family home and uncovering secrets she hadn’t known.

“It became clear that we weren’t moving far enough from what we’d already done. We needed to force ourselves to get further away,” Gaynor said. “We need another setting, isolated, that would feel abandoned.”

During a hiking trip with his wife in southern Oregon, he found another notion: a space station, one of many named after West Coast cities, controlled by a corporation with its eye on a guessed-at space economy. Lunar Transfer Station Tacoma was born.

One theme familiar to Tacomans carries forward: a certain lack of respect. The space station is no plum — just another outpost on the way to somewhere else, in a not-too-distant future bound to include grunt work.

“Tacoma is a way station between the Earth and the moon,” Gaynor said. “(The crew) are kind of like lighthouse keepers for this place, but it’s not the best assignment.”

“It’s not glamorous, not real cool,” Zimonja added, grinning.

“It’s not the first posting that you would choose,” Gaynor said.

The game is humble in another sense. Gaynor and Zimonja are independent developers who prefer to work at a slower pace on a smaller scale, though both have direct connections to what might be called gaming royalty.

Much like the film industry, gaming has its tent poles and blockbusters. Major franchises, such as “Call of Duty” and “Assassin’s Creed,” require scores of designers, artists, scriptwriters and voice talent.

At Fullbright, Gaynor and Zimonja lead an eight-member team. Most work out of a small office in Portland.

Before forming Fullbright, Gaynor, a level designer, and Zimonja, an animation and research specialist, worked on the popular “Bioshock” franchise, and collaborated with creative director Ken Levine, one of the industry’s giants.

Two games in that series, “Bioshock 2” and “Bioshock Infinite,” feature work by Gaynor and Zimonja, including a stand-alone sub-story called “Minerva’s Den.”

The work was intense, but Gaynor, then working in San Francisco, gradually realized it wasn’t for him. Apart from that, he and his wife missed Portland, where he went to college.

“It was really cool to get to work with (Levine) because he had made stuff that inspired me when I was a kid,” Gaynor said. “But (‘Bioshock’) was a huge project, and I realized I didn’t want to work on huge projects anymore.”

Gaynor and Zimonka are approaching the home stretch for the spring release. When the game arrives, it will be downloadable, playable on computers and Microsoft’s Xbox One console.

How long will it take to play through it? It’s not a gigantic game. Zimonja guesses it might take several evenings to complete, perhaps approaching the binge-watching time for a short TV miniseries.

Much depends on the player’s curiosity and interest in small details, she said. Some of them, lovingly crafted, are linked to a member of the missing crew: the semi-famous folk singer of the original version that would have taken place in Grit City.

The singer’s character survived the original conception. She’s a member of the crew, a Tacoma native, daughter of a working family. Her relatives worked for an unnamed Puget Sound aerospace company that constructed portions of the space station.

In the game, it’s possible to follow the singer’s digital ghost into her private quarters and watch like a guilty voyeur. The singer’s avatar picks up a guitar, sits on her bed, strums a tune and breaks a string.

“Really?” the character says quietly to herself.

On the wall next to her is a memento of Earth, a photograph: a landscape of Mount Rainier and a vista of spring flowers blooming at a place called Paradise.

This story was originally published September 21, 2016 at 11:36 AM with the headline "Video game called ‘Tacoma’ invites players to explore a mystery inspired by the City of Destiny."